Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival

Colby Quarterly Colby Quarterly

Volume 17 Issue 3 September Article 5

September 1981

Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival

Robert F. Garratt

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 17, no.3, September 1981, p.170-183

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby.

http://www.colby.edu/

http://www.colby.edu/

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss3

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol17/iss3/5

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq?utm_source=digitalcommons.colby.edu%2Fcq%2Fvol17%2Fiss3%2F5&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages

Patrick Kavanagh andthe Killing of the Irish Revival

by ROBERT F. GARRATT

W HEN W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Russell (AE) and GeorgeMoore shaped the literary movement now known as the Irish Re

naissance or the Irish Revival, they were responding both to a culturaland artistic void in Irish literature and to their own needs as aspiringwriters. Much of the early momentum of the Revival was generated bythe rediscovery of Celtic materials which not only provided a contextand a tradition connecting modern Irish writing with its ancient literarypast, but also offered, as the young Yeats said often in his letters toKatherine Tynan, the opportunity for the Irish poet to be innovative. Ina letter dated 13 August 1887 he writes, "but remember, by being Irishas you can, you will be more original and true to yourself and in thelong run more interesting, even to English readers.") Again in May,1888, "I think you will be right to make your ballad Irish. You will beso much more original." 2 Yeats, AE and others felt that by being deliberately Irish one could create in poetry a freshness and uniqueness thatwould distinguish it from the English tradition. The results of their efforts are now a part of literary history. 3 Not only did they gain the benefits in their own writing but they also inspired other writers to developIrish material.

But the founders of the Revival did more than encourage youngerwriters to take up Irish themes. In their decision to found a national literary society and a national theater in Dublin, and to live and workthere as writers, they created a literary capital, the center of the Irishmovement. The important effect of this activity was that the Irish Revival had a distinctly urban feature, characterized by a sub-culture, a kindof literary fraternity which gathered regularly for conversation and exchanged ideas. 4 A generation later, however, the tightness of the subculture existed without the glowing results in poetry, drama and fiction.

1. Alan Wade, ed., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (New York: MacMillan, 1955), p. 51.2. Wade, p. 71.3. Studies of the Irish Revival are numerous, dating back to Ernest Boyd's pioneer study Ireland's

Literary Renaissance (1922). Recent studies include Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of theIrish Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970) and Richard Farris, The Irish Renaissance (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1977).

4. "At homes" were held weekly at Yeats's house, AE's and Oliver St. John Gogarty's. Youngerwriters were particularly welcome at AE's. See Austin Clarke, A Penny in the Clouds (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 51-55.

170

1

Garratt: Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival

Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1981

ROBERT F. GARRATT 171

Literature had begun to repeat the themes of the Revival, diminishingsomewhat the excitement of the gatherings of writers, whose ranks nowwere swelled by would-be poets and literary tourists.

Thus in the 1930's and 1940's, the golden opportunity had tarnishedconsiderably. A new generation of Irish writers was coming into its own,among then1 Austin Clarke, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and Patrick Kavanagh, who found the literary scene stale. The problem forthese young writers was not what it had been for their elders and betters,the architects of the Revival, who felt the need for an Irish context andtradition. On the contrary, for this new generation the opposite wastrue: the tradition was all too vivid, so prominent in fact it was epidemic. The mythic material and folk-lore which in the early Yeats hadseen1ed so strange and unfan1iliar, had become commonplace. Ironically, the very tradition which was to give writers identity and to providethem with fresh metaphors began to stifle them, assimilating individualvoices into a common chorus echoing the old subjects in the establishedstyle. Some of the younger writers, especially Clarke, O'Connor,O'Faolain and Kavanagh, recognized the seductive dangers in the Irishmode and sensed the inevitability of cliche and imitation. As a resultthey attempted to strike out in new directions, toward social criticism,the psychological and the personal. In each case the motivating force behind such a move involved the individual's attempt to place himselfwithin the Irish literary tradition without being absorbed by it.

Of all these younger writers, none struck back at the tenets of the Revival and the Dublin literary sub-culture as aggressively as Kavanagh.Born in rural Monaghan in the north of Ireland, he lived on a farm forthirty years, squeezing in his avocation-poetry-during the spare timefrom his farming. He moved to Dublin in 1939, attracted to the city forthe literary opportunities it would provide, the libraries, newspapers andmost of all the promise of literary conversation and friendships. Livingin the city, however, Kavanagh soon became disillusioned. He wasstruck by the closeness and the pretention of the literary sub-culture,and with the inbred quality of its ideas and conversation. More strikingsurely for a young poet from the country was the sheer number of poetsand writers in Dublin, some of them with established reputations, othersstruggling like himself, but all of them his competitors. Like the youngYeats nearly fifty years before, Kavanagh sensed that success as a writerdepended upon making oneself unique, thereby reducing, if not eliminating, one's competitors.

Kavanagh's dilemma cannot be underestimated, I think, since it typifies the one faced by many Irish writers of his generation. Part of it canbe explained by the presence of Yeats, whose achievement and personality were such that he dominated Irish literature for more than fiftyyears. Following Yeats's death in 1939, the situation did not improve;for as the critics set to work establishing Yeats's reputation, they neces-

2

Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, Iss. 3 [1981], Art. 5


172 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY

sarily neglected younger poets. What little critical attention these youngpoets did receive centered upon the inevitable comparison with Yeats,which tied their work more emphatically to him and slighted their ownindividual achievement. As Donald Davie suggests, "for Irish poets ...Yeats must figure as the great ventriloquist; if they relax their concentration for a second, or become any more familiar than they must with thehighly distinctive Yeatsian idiom and cadence, they find themselves sitting on the great ventriloquist's knee, using not their own voice buthis."5 Austin Clarke, Kavanagh's contemporary and literary rival, describes the situation. "So far as the younger generation of poets are concerned . . . Yeats was rather like an enormous oak-tree which, ofcourse, kept us in the shade . . . we always hoped that in the end wewould reach the sun, but the shadow of that great oak-tree is stillthere."6

For Kavanagh the situation was even more complex. He not onlyfaced the formidable challenge of Yeats, but also the closed ranks of theDublin literary crowd. Most of the established writers resented a newtalent since it meant further competition in already crowded circumstances. Thus, to protect themselves they greeted Kavanagh's arrival onthe Dublin scene with characteristic reductive humor, seizing upon hisraw-boned physique, his unpolished manner, his poverty and most of allhis country background. 7 He was held up as the authentic version of aRevival fiction, the peasant-poet from the bog, capable of stirring poeticutterances yet simple to the core. The identification as the peasant-poetwas calculated to be ironical; those who called attention to his ruralmanner did so not to celebrate his talent and genius, but rather to placehim beyond the pale of Irish letters.

Kavanagh responded by denying the source and demythologizing thevery tenets of the Revival, the idealization of rural Ireland and the celebration of the peasant. He exposed the Dublin literary enclave as imitators and not inventors who rely on cliches rather than their own imagination. This single theme was to be at the center of his criticism throughout the 1940's and early 1950's. Again and again he attacked the stagnant lifeless quality of the literature produced by his contemporaries. Ina letter to his brother, Kavanagh writes, "Of the Irish movement youknow plenty . . . they presented an essentially sentimental Ireland. . . .The Yeats-Synge phoney Ireland was eminently suited for export toAmerica and it has falsified the picture of this country." 8 This falseness

5. "Austin Clarke and Padraic Fallon," Two Decades of Irish Writing, Douglas Dunn, ed. (ChesterSprings, Pennsylvania: Dufour Editions, 1975), p. 42.

6. W. R. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972), p. 19.7. Typical of the humor at Kavanagh's expense is the remark by Seumus O'Sullivan, a minor poet of

the Revival, but an important literary personality in 1940 Dublin. It is found in Clarke's A Penny in theClouds, p. 71. "One evening, looking from the drawing-room of his house in Morehampton Road, he(S.O'S.) saw a man pushing a handcart with a small load of manure. 'I see that Paddy Kavanagh ismoving. There go his furniture and effects.' "

8. Letter to Peter Kavanagh, August Bank Holiday, 1947, Lapped Furrows, Peter Kavanagh, ed.(New York: The Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1969).

3




in literature he identified as the "Irish thing," a contrived pastoralism inmuch of the poetry and the tedious re-working of the folk-tales andlegends of ancient Ireland. Writers who were in Kavanagh's opinionminor talents were being published solely because they wrote on Irishthemes and used Irish subject matter. He accused these writers of posingas poets and labeled them as inferior to the previous generation sincethey were imitators. In his poem, "The Paddiad," he portrays themyopic visions and blunted imaginations of the post-Yeatsian Irishpoets:

In the corner of a Dublin pubThis party opens-blub-a-blubPaddy Whiskey, Rum and GinPaddy Three sheets in the wind;Paddy of the Celtic Mist,Paddy Connemara West,Chesteronian Paddy FrogCroaking nightly in the bog.All the Paddies having funSince Yeats handed in his gun. 9

The plot advances as the devil, disguised as an Irish writer, offers a prizefor the best poem from each Irish county. All the poets eagerly agree tojoin in, but argue among themselves that the verses must be exclusivelyon Irish subjects. The satire is too overt and vindictive to be greatpoetry, but it does allow Kavanagh to make his point. Through a criticism of the Revival, Kavanagh hoped to accomplish negatively whatYeats achieved through the use of Celtic materials, an artistic autonomythrough a governing fiction, a chance to set himself apart from otherwriters and to provide himself with some imaginative space. By attacking individual writers and general literary trends in Ireland Kavanaghcreates a void demanding the new poetry which he will write. The strategy allows him to have it both ways: taken as a peasant poet by the Dublin literati, he attacks their provincialism; by characterizing their workas the worn-out baggage of the Revival, he justifies his own poetry.

Kavanagh's main line of attack was to focus on those poets whowished to be called "Irish." Nationalism was too inward looking, heclaimed; it became cant, jingoism and propaganda, not art. It was inpoetry and fiction what the stage-Irishman had become in theater, astereotype, thoroughly predictable. He writes in a critical essay, "Iobject to Nationalism, particularly Irish nationalism in letters, becauseof the harm it does, the false values it postulates." 10 The minor writersand secondary talents chose nationalism and Irishness because theylacked a conviction over the sustaining powers of their own imaginative

9. Collected Poems (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), p. 34. Hereafter CP, with all references topoems to be included in the text.

10. "St. Stephen's," Trinity Term, 1962, quoted in The Journal of Irish Literature, VI, 1 (January1977), 28.

4




VISIons. Thus Kavanagh describes them not as genuine creative artists,but by-products of the excitement and energy initiated by Yeats and hisgeneration: "The Irish Literary Revival consisted of a few writers of realquality and a large crowd of hangers-on pretending to be drunk on thefumes of the cask. Then-the warm fog lifted, and ... people began towonder what had happened to all the young geniuses."11

While Kavanagh's critical attitudes toward the Irish school of literature are consistent in their disdain and censure, his treatn1ent of W. B.Yeats as part of that school is more ambiguous. On the one hand Yeatsis blamed for his role in perpetrating the Irish movement and for thelimitations which occur in his poetry as a result. In an essay on YeatsKavanagh remarks: "Yeats took up Ireland and made it his myth andtheme. And you can see him today standing in the centre of that myth,uneasy that he doesn't belong."12 And elsewhere, carrying on his familiar debunking of the Revival, he singles out Yeats's Celtic phase: " ...the work of Yeats which is deliberately Irish in this way sounds awfullyphony. Irishness is a form of anti-art." 13 These comments are neverdeveloped and give the impression, as much of Kavanagh's criticismdoes, of half-baked, impulsive remarks delivered chiefly for their shockvalue. There is no attempt to explain or analyze the uneasiness ofYeats's stance in Irish myth, nor to expand the notion of the insincerityof the Irish voice, both of which if developed might provide interestingperspectiyes .

Not all of the criticism of Yeats is negative, however, despite Kavanagh's penchant for denigrating all other writers whose work might becompared to his own. In fact, the bulk of the remarks on Yeatsacknowledges his achievement, poetic genius and, particularly, hisprominence in modern poetry. The positive aspect of the remarks, however, does not change Kavanagh's tendency to remain shallow and inconclusive in the treatment of his subject. Analysis of Yeats is replacedby impression or opinion, tossed-off, with little regard for connection orforce of argument:

Yeats, until his old age, worked a precious and very narrow vein of ore. It was onlytowards the end that he saw the potentialities of mass-production. . . . Yeats had themisfortune to come at a bad time; in the wake of Victorianism. His material was a wearyparochial thing; Irish nationalism. Yet he has a good deal of the voracious appetite anddigestion of a great poet. 14

Furthermore, recognition and praise are uttered sollo voce, since thereal subject of all Kavanagh criticism is Kavanagh himself, and its aimself-aggrandizement, especially at the expense of rival poets and novelists. It is characteristic, therefore, that the respect shown for Yeats's art

11. Irish Times, August 15, 1942.12. "William Butler Yeats," Collected Pruse (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967), p. 254.13. "On a Liberal Education," November Haggard, Peter Kavanagh, ed. (New York: The Peter

Kavanagh Hand Press, 1971), p. 80.14. "Auden and the Creative Mind," Collected Pruse, p. 251.

5




comes often during commentary on other poets' failures or shortcomings:

The poems being written are like perfectly laid-out corpses on a slab. They are perfectlyshaped and perfectly dead. . . . One of the qualities I most admired about Yeats was hiscontempt for death. During the lifetime of Yeats that living poem appeared again andagain ... the imitators of Yeats are to be pitied rather than censured, as are all who walkthe barren fields where the master reaped. 15

While this shallowness aggravates the reader eager for an assessment ofYeats by another Irish poet, it points to an interesting tendency on Kavanagh's part to avoid any real consideration of Yeats's poetry, and tofocus instead on Yeats the man, Yeats the personality or, even more removed, the Yeats industry. The ambiguity toward Yeats is understandable from a psychological point of view, considering Kavanagh's alienation from the Dublin literary scene and his desire to become a greatpoet. His unwillingness to confront Yeats's poetry and the vacillationbetween censure and praise reflect Kavanagh's uneasiness about his ownplight as a poet writing in the proximity of a major talent. By refusing tolionize Yeats, by demonstrating subjectivity in the criticism, Kavanaghshows that the need to establish a certain authority is partly necessary toescape the influence of Yeats on his poetry, and it is also useful in hisdisdain and contempt for the Dublin literary crowd who rejected him.

It is important to recognize that Kavanagh's quarrel with Yeats is confused, inconsistent and forced. First of all, in this aspect of his poetry atleast, Kavanagh is a revisionist, and while this may guarantee him ahearing, it will also n1ake clear his debt to the Revival: in this sense,ironically, Yeats makes Kavanagh's poetry possible. 16 In the act of revision there will necessarily be selection and interpretation, so that Kavanagh defines the Yeats against whom he does battle. In so doing, heobscures the point, deliberately ignoring the fact that Yeats, himself,grew weary of the practice of the Revival, especially as it began tospread among so many younger poets. In a poem to AE in 1909 entitled"To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitatorsof His and Mine," Yeats criticizes the lack of originality andimagination in the new poets.

You say, as I have often given tongueIn praise of what another's said or sung,'Twere politic to do the like by these;But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

(Collected Poems of w. B. Yeats [New York, MacMillan, 1968], p. 92)

Yeats's concern was not a momentary regret, but something he heldeven in old age. In 1932, in a letter to Olivia Shakespear he criticizes indirectly the Irish mode in literature: "An Irish poet, Austin Clarke, has

15. "Poetry in Ireland Today," The Bell, April 1948.16. I am grateful to Robert Ryf of Occidental College for suggesting this point.

6




just sent me a romance called The Bright Temptation. . . . Read it andtell me should I make him an academician. I find it difficult to see, withimpartial eyes, these Irish writers who are as it were part of my propaganda."!? Kavanagh chooses to overlook this aspect of Yeats's poeticdevelopment because it would weaken, or at least diffuse, his criticalbase and lessen his own role as an iconoclast.! 8

Furthermore, it is largely Kavanagh's own contemporaries and notYeats himself whom Kavanagh wishes to displace; Yeatsianism, then,rather than Yeats, is the real target. Thus when it suits him, Kavanaghcan ally himself with Yeats-the implication is that they are equalswhen he belittles those minor writers who attempt to climb in underYeats's umbrella. In a letter to his brother in December of 1950 Kavanagh places himself in august company. "There have been, besides myself, only two or possibly three good writers, Joyce, Yeats, O'Casey."19Yet at the same time he criticizes his contemporaries for Yeatsianism,for keeping alive the false values of the Revival, and limiting their workto Irish materials and subjects. Thus, Kavanagh's criticism becomes,simultaneously, his own advertisement. He minimizes the achievementof his rivals and contemporaries, and pronounces a waste land conditionin Irish letters, caused by beating to death Yeats's tired circus animals.It is a simple matter then for Kavanagh himself to fill the void with anew kind of poetry, unmistakeable in its originality, which reflects ahard-wrung knowledge of the land and depicts rural Ireland realistically,beautiful but back-breaking.

Kavanagh's very early poetry, Ploughman and Other Poems (1936),started tamely enough with nature poems very much in the Irish mode.These are simple celebrations of the land's beauty, treatment offolktales and the spirit of the land, and even an exploitation-as one caninfer from the title of the volume-of the concept of the peasant-poet,walking his fields and composing verse:

I turn the lea-green downGaily now,And paint the meadow brownWith my plough.

I dream with silvery gullAnd brazen crow.A thing that is beautifulI may know. ("Ploughman," CP, p. 3)

The treatment of folk material in these early pieces, both in subject mat-

17. Wade, p. 795.18. The concept of misreading or "misprision" which Harold Bloom discusses in The Anxiety of In

fluence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973) and elsewhere applies only incidentally in Kavanagh'scase, I believe. Kavanagh's neglect of Yeats's views of the younger poets, while clear, is simply one of anumber of anomalies one sees throughout Kavanagh's criticism. For this reason, it is impossible to sensea prevailing single direction which resembles the emphatic "swerve" which Bloom identifies as a poet'sresponse to his precursor.

19. Letter to Peter Kavanagh, December 1950, Lapped Furrows.

7




ter and in rhythm and sound, suggests an affinity with the earlier Revival poetry. Furthermore, the presence of Yeats in these early lyrics isapparent:

I shall drink of the white goat's milk,The old white goat of Slieve Donard,Slieve Donard where the herbs of wisdom grow,The herbs of the Secret of Life that the old white goat has nibbled,

And I shall live longer than Methuselah,Brother to no man. ("The Goat of Slieve Donard," CP, p. 5)

In all of these early poems, in fact, we sense the very Irish note, the imitation and repetition of the literature of the Revival, which Kavanagh sobitterly denounces in his criticism. It is precisely this, as we know fromthe criticism, that the poet fears: to write your own poetry only toremind your reader of another poet or a literary movement. Undoubtedly, Kavanagh saw the inevitable difficulty with these early poems, thatthey were an artistic dead-end. They were a necessary stage, however,part of the struggle to achieve a personal integrity and an independence.It is a tribute to Kavanagh as a poet that he understood the complexitiesof influence this early in his career. Within three years he had not onlyfreed himself of the seductive influence of the Revival, he had sounded atruly unique note in Irish poetry, and changed its course away from thepastoral tendencies of his contemporaries.

In 1942, with the publication of "The Great Hunger," Kavanagh delivered the death-blow to what he termed the false myth of the Revival,the idyllic portrayal of those close to the soil. Instead of lofty sentimentbased on spiritual naturalism Kavanagh presented the grim details ofhumble, rural life-the rocky hills, potato pits, piles of dung, hardwork, long days, monotonous routine. "The Great Hunger" is a longpoem-756 lines-describing the life of Patrick Maguire, who farms anunnamed area in the hills of rural Ireland. It presents with painstakingexactness Maguire's attempts to survive physically, psychologically andemotionally. The poem opens with direct reference to the land:

Clay is the word and clay is the fleshWhere the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows moveAlong the side-fall of the hill-Maguire and his men. (CP, p. 34)

Immediately, however, we are in another world, devoid of sentimentality and idealism. We see instead rusty ploughs, broken buckets, ditches,frozen ground and the slow, steady evaporation of Maguire's life-force:

. . . Watch him, that man on a hill whose spiritIs a wet sack flapping about the knees of timeHe lives that his little fields may stay fertile when

his own bodyIs spread in the bottom of ditch under two coultlers

in Christ's name. (CP, p. 35)

8




The force of this poem comes not simply from the realistic descriptionof potato and turnip farming, though the harshness of that life is vividlyportrayed. It comes, rather, from the story of Maguire, himself, whosegreat hunger is sexual, spiritual and intellectual. He cares for his motherwho lives to ninety-one:

She stayed too long,Wife and mother in oneWhen she diedThe knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her

son's backsideAnd he was sixty-five. (CP, p. 36)

He takes no wife while he has other cares; he always waits for betterluck, a good harvest, another year, the right woman. Always there is theroutine, the work, the woman he sins with in his mind, his guilt and, atnight before the fire, his dreams. The rigid morality of his church closedaround him and guilt-ridden responsibility trapped him. In the endMaguire never marries, lives out his old age in loneliness, beaten downby his narrow existence. A farmer whose livelihood depends on thingsgrowing and living, he nevertheless withers:

No crashNo dramaThat was how his life happened.No mad hooves galloping the sky,But the weak, washy way of true tragedy-A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

(CP, p. 53)

The portrait of rural life in "The Great Hunger" spares no detail inits attempt to counter what Kavanagh saw as the false view of the landfashioned by Yeats and Lady Gregory. In "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," Yeats celebrates the achievement of the poetic imagination intouch with the essence of rural Ireland.

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thoughtAll that we did, all that we said or sangMust come from contact with the soil, from thatContact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

(Collected Poems of w. B. Yeats, p. 318)

Sensing the irony that Yeats and others who imitated him were essentially urban writers whose understanding of the land was primarily imaginative, Kavanagh sought to depict a genuine contact with the soil anddemonstrate the hostility of rural life to the poetic imagination. Wesense in the consistency and depth of the portrait of Maguire's worldthe hard work,.the poverty of mind and body, and the suffocating closeness of a village community-a bitterness behind the lines, an angry corrective to those poets who would celebrate the beauty and simplicity ofrural Ireland. The bitterness extends beyond the human and the socio-

9




logical levels, although it certainly includes them, to the implication inYeats's lines that the poetic imagination will grow stronger with closeness to the land. Kavanagh's resentment over such a view is implicitthroughout "The Great Hunger," as is obvious from the treatment ofthe subject matter; it becomes explicit in certain places, however, whenKavanagh refers directly to the problem of the imagination. At thesemoments in the poem the treatment of Maguire shifts slightly to becomen10re general, a type rather than an individual. In the midst of giving usspecific details about Maguire's day, Kavanagh makes some general reference to the peasant who tried to sing but repeated the same melody,"the dragging step of a ploughman going home," or elsewhere thepeasant-poet whose poems are pulled weeds, "withered in the Julysun." In section XIII the subject of the poetic imagination goes beyondmere mention, however, and is developed at length, as a subject in itsown right.

The peasant has no worries;In his little lyrical fieldsHe ploughs and sows; . . .His heart is pure,His mind is clear, . . .The peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he

drives.The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green

bank into his fields.There is the pool in which the poet dips . . .The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy,The peasant is all virtues-let us salute him without ironyThe peasant ploughman who is half a vegetableWho can react to sun and rain and sometimes evenRegret that the Maker of Light had not touched him more intensely.

(CP, pp. 52-53)

With these lines the harsh realities presented in the poem go beyondtragic narrative; in the context of modern Irish poetry, they criticize"the Irish thing" dreamt up by a previous generation of writers and exploited by the present. The balance here, however, is precarious, withthe bitterness and preachiness threatening to overturn the poem. Yet, inlight of the entire poem, they do not. It is a credit to Kavanagh's poeticcontrol that the focus ren1ains essentially fixed on its true subject. Thepowerful depiction of rural life, chiefly through the characterization ofMaguire, allows the poem to tolerate those rare moments when Kavanagh as critic enters the poem.

In his willingness to turn Yeatsian romanticism into reality, Kavanaghprofitted greatly from James Joyce's probing of the Irish Catholic experience, particularly in the various portraits of still-life in Dubliners. 2o

20. Joyce has been significantly important to middle-class Catholic writers in Ireland, among theseClarke, O'Faolain t O'Connor and Thomas Kinsella.

10



180 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERL Y

Joyce's determination not to become merely a part of the literary paradebegun by Yeats and Lady Gregory caused him to move in a different direction, toward realism and the portrayal of middle class urban life. Thedepth and complexity of his portraits of spiritual, intellectual and emotional sterility provided for those writers who followed him an alternative to the poetic tradition dominated by Yeats. Thus Paddy Maquirecan be seen from a Joycean perspective, as a rural counterpart of thecharacters in Dubliners. Maguire succumbs to the forces which form theJoycean paralysis: a domineering mother, a life-draining church, anintellectually-dulling routine to earn a living. Maguire lacks the imagination to survive such a world; he is dead emotionally and spiritually.Joycean realism makes perfect artistic sense for Kavanagh, providinghim with a subject and theme without the accompanying burden of theformal aspects of poetic style and imagery. The simple fact that Joyceaccomplished what he did in fiction allowed Kavanagh an opportunityin another genre; thus a Joycean direction in poetry is liberating ratherthan restricting. Furthermore, what Joyce did with the Irish city,Kavanagh felt he might do with the Irish countryside. Scrutinizing theCatholic experience and depicting realistically the rural Irish sceneallowed Kavanagh the benefits of a literary model without stifling him;he could be innovative if ,not original.

While he perhaps never again achieved the depth and complexity ofthe effects of rural life on an individual, Kavanagh followed "The GreatHunger" with realistic poetry about the country and the farm he left behind. Like many transplanted countrymen who live in cities, he wrote ofthe memories of his time on the land. The difference with Kavanagh'spoetry, however, is his resistance to nostalgia; his treatment of the country remains essentially non-sentimental. The memories of the land arethose about the hard days of labor, the battle with the soil or the weather over a meager crop, the unglamorous task of carting dung, and thefirm hold the land has over those who live close to it:

o Stony grey soil of MonaghanThe laugh from my love you thieved . . .You flung a ditch on my visionOf beauty and love and truth. (CP, p. 92)

After Kavanagh's very dangerous illness in 1955, which resulted in theremoval of a cancerous lung, a noticeable shift takes place in his poetry.The illness was looked upon by Kavanagh himself as a turning point,during which he felt he was born as an artist. In "Canal Bank Walk,"written during recuperation, new life is announced in baptismalimagery:

Leafy-with-Iove banks and the green waters of the canalPouring redemption for me, that I doThe will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,Grow with nature again as before I grew. (CP, p. 150)

11




The poetry written during this period until his death in 1967 is characterized by a rejection of satire, particularly the steady attack upon hiscontemporaries which had occupied his attention in the late 1940's andearly 1950's. The new mood is best expressed in the short four-line poemappropriately titled "Freedom":

Take me to the top of the high hillMount Olympus laughter-roaring unsolemnWhere no one is angry and satiredAbout a mortal creature on a tall column. (CP, p. 155)

The turn from satire toward love, ". . . my intention is not satire buthumaneness" (CP, p. 167), becomes in these last poems a theme in itself, as well as an attitude. Treatment of life in rural Ireland continuesto be an inlportant subject and remains realistic, but there is a noticeable change both in the voice and in the scope of the treatment. The bitterness of the narrative voice, obvious in "The Great Hunter," givesway to a quiet acceptance and a comic vision:

A humble scene in a backward place. . . A primrose, a violet,

A violent wild iris-but mostly anonymous performersYet an important occasion as the Muse at her toiletPrepared to inform the local farmersThat beautiful, beautiful, beautiful GodWas breathing His love by a cutaway bog. (CP, p. 158)

The difference here is that the emphasis falls upon the contemplation,rather than simply the representation of life. A way of seeing detail andobjects, or what Kavanagh calls in a number of poems "naming," takesprecedence over the realistic world which is being seen:

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorryThe seat at the back of the shed that was a suntrap.Naming these things is the love-act and the pledge. (CP, p. 153)

With contemplation and the process of observation emerging here assubject matter, the later poetry expands its perspective to contain thepoet himself as subject, sometimes as a youth, or in middle age struggling with materials and themes which form the basis of art; more often,however, as the established writer, reflecting on the art of poetry andthe role of the poet. References to writing and rewriting, to the sourceof his poetry, and to the loss of inspiration, when' 'Old Cunning Silencemight not be a better bet than poetry" (CP, p. 131), appear throughoutthese poems; in some poems, such as "Come Dance with Kitty Stobling," or the following lines from "Intimate Parnassus," the poet ashero is the subject of the poem:

... mere menAre climbing out on dangerous branches

12




Of Banking, insurance, and shops; ..Poet, you have reason to be sympatheticCount them the beautiful unbrokenAnd then forget themAs things aside from the main purpose (CP, p. 146)

Kavanagh's focus on the character of the poet and the writing ofpoetry suggests a further comparison with Yeats, who wrote often in hislast poems about poetry and poets. In "The Circus Animals' Desertion"Yeats describes losing his themes and metaphors and being forced tolook back into his heart for the source of poetic subject matter. Hisfamous advice to future Irish poets in "Under Ben Bulbain" is predicated on tradition, a sense of the heroic, and a feeling for the greatnessof the past; young poets should cast their minds on other days of heroicIrish heritage. Kavanagh has his own thoughts on Ireland's heroic past,and his reaction to Yeats's ideas provide a contrasting view. Rather thanthe glamorous portrait of the hard-riding country gentleman and thelords and ladies gay, Kavanagh shows a decadent, corrupted side:

I came to a great house on the edge of the parkThinking of Yeats's dream Great House where allNobility was protected by ritualThough all lay drunk on the floor and in the darkTough louts and menial minds in the shrubberies lurkAnd negative eunuchs hate in an outer hall. (CP, p. 185)

The criticism fits with the early references to the fabricated sentimentalversion of nationalistic literature, but unlike the earlier practice, ridiculeand reproof are not the essence of the poetic statement. In their place,Kavanagh offers an affirmation of life and a celebration of the simpleand the ordinary. He denies Yeats's continued interest in seeking higherrealities through myth, history and visionary schemes, "No system, noPlan / Yeatsian Invention / No all-over / Organisational prover" (CP,p. 173), and, instead, offers a different kind of advice to younger poets,one which insists upon the particulars of life as it is lived, and on thesimple poetic act of naming of things:

Name for the futureThe everydays of natureAnd without being analyticCreate a great epic.Girls in red blouses,Steps up to houses,Sunlight round gables,Gossip's young fables,The life of a street. (CP, p. 154)

Kavanagh's assertion of his artistry is founded on rejection and negation of the literary conventions of his day. Sensing in his early poetrythat the material of the Revival would mean imaginative death and creative stultification, that he would be merely an imitator rather than an

13




artist, Kavanagh attempts to establish his authenticity by striking outboth in theory and in practice-at the existing tenets of the nationalistmovement in Irish literature. The heart of his struggle is the inevitableconflict with Yeats, the chief architect of the literary Revival and thegreatest poet of the twentieth century. For Kavanagh the struggle is inescapable: Yeats represents the rootless force creating its own base andcontext, idealizing and conceiving of a literary nationalism which lookstoward the land, yet remains essentially urban. Kavanagh on the otherhand represents rooted experience which knows too well the realities ofrural life, and looks toward art as an escape. The fact that Yeats is thedominant presence in Irish poetry makes Kavanagh's difficulty morepronounced. He must walk the thin line between admiration and recognition of genius on the one side, and imitation and assinlilation on theother. In the process of that balance, Kavanagh has oversimplified hiscritical perspective, misread and misjudged many writers includingYeats, spoken outrageously about his own abilities, and posed as aDublin crank and character. He has also given us five or six greatpoems, a number of other very memorable ones, and provided an important new direction in modern Irish poetry.

University of Puget SoundTacoma, Washington

14



Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival

Documents

Transcript of Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival